A rocket cascades over
Cannes, then another.Fizz-bang!
Crash-crackle!Rainbow éclat of
stars – coloured explosions no sooner tendrilling towards earth then another rocket, then
another, begins its night-sky ascent to orgasm.

What a spectacle. It happens every Cannes. And this year, guess what, this
writer didn’t see it. By mischance, I chose the festival’s penultimate
midnight – fortuitously fireworks night – to catch Sam Raimi’s
DRAG ME TO HELL. This horror-thriller’s bangs, crashes and lightnings were good enough to keep every spectator in
his/her seat in the Salle duSoixantieme,
a giant viewing marquee on the edge of the bay, fireworks or no. Even so, the
feuxd’artifice were
sometimes agonizingly audible through the walls, as the crazy-gypsy plot on
screen tried to keep pace with the crazy mayhem outside.Once or twice we could hear the enraptured
roars of the crowd, gazing up at the celestial eye candy.

There are, though, let
us contend, fireworks and fireworks. You could argue that these outbreaks of
licensed incendiarism in the Mediterranean sky are
merely the outward-and-visible version (assuming you see them) of the snap,
crackle and pop happening inside cinemas.In DRAG ME TO HELL the mad stuff inside the
theatre was competitive with the mad stuff outside: you show me your coup
de foudre, I’ll show you mine.But thrilling too, in more figurative
fashion, were the indoor fireworks accompanying the screening of Lars von Trier’s ANTICHRIST. Only in Cannes do you get this kind
of virtual arson attack by moviegoers on a movie. So much had been heard
about the Danish naughty boy’s newest delinquency – sex, nudity, blasphemy,
psychobabble, violence, talking animals – that early
spectators went, so to speak, figuratively armed.They had the squibs to lob, if necessary,
and the pyrotechnic raspberries to fire.

Which they did.I was half-deafened merely by the chap next
to me. Throughout the screening he ignited his “Tsktsks!”, his Catherine
wheels of snickering, his crackling cackles of mockery (especially at the Tarkovsky dedication). And he joined in the final crepitation of ironic applause mixed with exuberant
barracking.If Trier
himself had been there, they would probably have burned him at the stake:
another firework display.Light the
blue touchpaper; retire; this one is called ‘Danish
Auto da Fe’.

Did the ANTICHRIST
audience uproar prejudice the ANTICHRIST reviews? Was the film quite
as bad as we thought or were we mugged by the Donner
und Blitzen of the mob of the moment?Appraisals of the film since it began its diaspora to world cinemas have been noticeably kinder –
much kinder.

Fireworks. Such fun.
But also, as we were told when children, dangerous.The poster for this year’s festival
reminded us of another conflagratorysuccess de scandale, and another famous critical injustice,
perhaps the most notable in Cannes history.

The poster showed
Monica Vitti in a scene from L’AVVENTURA
(1960).Most of you are too young to
remember. (Me too, but I know survivors).Yet the fact is, critics went berserk at that
screening too.Even the few who entered the cinema carrying devotional candles in
their soul, knowing Antonioni’s reputation, ended
up trying to torch the screen.The salle became a riot venue.Boos, shouts, stompings
of feet, shakings of fists.No one could understand Antonioni’s
plot – how come this woman disappears on a volcanic island and is never seen
again or re-found?What are these
wealthy, enervated lovers (Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti) doing forever wandering around Sicily with nothing
to do?Is there a point?Is there a meaning?Hell with it, let’s put the film to the
flames.

A decade or so later,
L’AVVENTURA was a poll-topper in magazine Ten Best Films of All Time.The movie is really, we learned (and if we
hadn’t been impatient might have understood at the time), all about spiritual
starvation, hunger for love and the death of God.Then again, perhaps a subliminal
understanding of this was what got under everyone’s skin.

We remember fondly
other holocausts in Cannes.Vincent Gallo’s
THE BROWN BUNNY must take the prize for the most spectacular detonation of
mockery in modern times: and audience hurling its
groans and mega-decibel tongue-clicks at a movie unlikely to be saved by
reappraisal.Antonioni
it isn’t. Time, BROWN BUNNY’s only hope and ally,
has already elapsed.

But the fireworks of
damnation at Cannes are outnumbered by those of acclamation. What is the
phosphoric flashing that bombards the stars on the Palais
steps each night but one kind of astral manifestation – flashbulbs – paying
homage to another?Ignisstellatus! Fire in Constellation Celebrity!

Fireworks are, after
all, man-made stars, with all the giddiness and instability ‘man-made’
suggests but with the ambition, at least, to reach the heavens or light up the
firmament.This year the ejaculations
of the shutterbugs (those mayflies who come out each May) were expended on
their favouritelove object of
all: Brad Pitt.Fireworks to the left
of Brad, fireworks to the right.Like
a true star – as in Keat’s “Would I were steadfast
as thou art” (see Jane Campion’s competition entry
BRIGHT STAR, all about Romantic poetry’s finest pyrotechnician)
– the lead performer of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS merely shone the brighter and
steadier.He even found time for a preux chevalier gesture of perfect
judgment, ducking back to the base of the escalier to take the hand of
his life partner, hanging back in the shadows, one Angelina Jolie. (Last year she, as star of Clint Eastwood’s
CHANGELING, pulled him out of the
shadows).

At the other end of
the Croisette erupts another nocturnal light show.Weren’t they
more numerous than ever this year, the evening seagulls that wail like
wandering comets, that wheel in lyric and angelic torment, while the town’s
megawatt illuminations cast upon them an underglow,
eerie, white-bright, incandescent? For Cannes regulars, jaded with les feuxd’artifice – artificial fires – these aerial beauties
are a Platonic ideal of pyrophilia.Rags of purified, animated radiance,
dancing in the midnight air.

How apt that the birds
circle over the site of the old Palais des
Festivals: the one knocked down to create a casino hotel that now house in
its basement, the Directors Fortnight.The gulls must be ghosts of the bygone demigods who frequented the
festival’s first heyday.That seagull
up there must surely be Jean Cocteau; that one over there, Marcel Carne.The gull show is fireworks without
explosion, fireworks almost without sound.Yet these magical spirit-flames honour the
magic continued on this acre by the Quinzaine des Realisateurs.(By
the way, in an event that in bad years can be strictly for the birds, let’s
hear it for the 2009 Quinzaine’s best-in-show.
Xavier Dolan’s J’AI TUE MA MERE.Dolan
lights the fuse to a comedy-drama witty with its own detonations.It’s a teenager’s film about a teenager –
played by Dolan – dealing with incipient incest.“Oedipus Schmoedipus,”
goes the adage, “what’s wrong with a boy who loves his mother?” Several
things, suggests the filmmaker/star.And there are several imaginative ways, including matricide, to see
the problem off).

But no firework
display at Cannes, indoor or outdoor, can beat the ovation accorded a loved
director.This happens in the day’s
main afternoon showing at the SalleLumiere.The applause – five minutes, ten minutes,
fifteen – crackles like gunfire.The
flashbulbs burst in eye-searing staccato.The happy recipient or tear-drowned victim waits it all out, not
knowing whether to wave, smile or faint, or hold a hand to his heart, or try at
some point to placate the storm with a gesture resembling Moses telling the
Red Sea to calm down.

Yes. Anything the real
fireworks can do, out there in the bay, we festivalgoers
can match in the combustible world of the Cannes viewing theatre.We are forged in fire, gunpowder, conflict
and alarm.On the Coted’Azur,
in that momentous month between April and June, every day is a “Mayday!”

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.